


Here In The Real World

by god_is_undead



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And He Takes It Personally, Anime Universe Only, Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Consequences, Crimes & Criminals, Cultural Differences, Decisions were made, Developing Friendships, Drugs, During Canon, Empathy, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fish out of Water, From Sex to Love, Gang Violence, Genre Savvy, I write the weirdest shit and i'm sorry, I'm Going to Hell, Ignorant OC, Isekai, Manipulation, Nobody gets what they want and everyone gets what they want, Nobody involved is wildly romantic, Not A Fix-It, Political Alliances, Politics, Pre-Canon, Privilege, Sarcasm, She learns though, Should Not Be Attempted On Vicious, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Social Currents At Work, Social Issues, Sorry Not Sorry, Sort Of, Therapy Would Be Useful, Trust Issues, Uneasy Tolerance to Tolerance to Sex, Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable POV, Very Bittersweet Outcomes, Vicious has Issues, Vicious is not a nice man, You'll have to read to know, bad decision making skills, bad life choices, but not really, eventually, in a weird way, is closer to the point, mutual misunderstanding, mutual tolerance, of a sort, well ok I headcanon spike and julia as romantic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:49:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28583031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_is_undead/pseuds/god_is_undead
Summary: Tess awakes on Mars as a runaway from a prestigious family, which has dealings with the criminal underworld of Mars. She has zero interest in their plans for her life. But, if they won't let her escape this gilded Hell, then she's going to make that Everybody Else's problem.Is "annoying the very scary gangster everybody tells her to stay away from into noticing she exists" a good idea? No. But, as a means to an end, Vicious is her best shot. Money is power, after all."Why do you want to help me?" ~ "I don't want to sit in the throne, I just need to be near it."
Relationships: Spike/Julia, Vicious/OC
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Here In The Real World

**Author's Note:**

> Oh look! I'm back with another *more or less similar to the other twenty fucking stories like it I haven't finished yet.*
> 
> I have a problem. Yes, I know.

Tess never saw the truck coming. 

* * *

She sat up slowly, winding up slumped on her heels, leaning forward on her palms pressed flat on the concrete, panting. Her head pounded, her ears were tight. She popped them, which took some of the edge off. Her mouth felt awfully dry and nausea churned her gut, threatening to spill her lunch on the concrete. _Where is my phone? My wallet, my keys?_ All she had on her were her clothes, and thank god she was still wearing her glasses at least. Without them, Tess was practically blind.

When she did finally manage to wrestle her stomach into submission and get a good look around herself, she realized that she couldn’t see the mountains on the far end of the short alley on one end. The buildings around her were large, not 19th century red brick. The alley smelled like old piss and vomit, and a reeking dumpster further down completed the off-putting ambiance.

Tess got to her feet, stumbling once. _Where the fuck am I, because this is nowhere I recognize_. The town she lived in was tiny and rural. It was no more than a couple thousand people clustered together in a Northern Appalachian valley with a single gas station that also happened to be the brightest thing in town after dark. The point was, there was absolutely nothing this urban there; this looked like the back alley of some big city, like Chicago, or New York City. Tess was no stranger to the city, hell, she had grown up in one, but she was literally hours away from the nearest significant metropolitan center in any direction.

And the temperature. It had been warm and actually not very humid for once, not cold and damp.

It didn’t cross Tess' mind to be afraid in that red hot moment, it barely registered that this could be real, but through her pounding heartbeat and rapid breath she did want to know what the _fuck_ was going on, and where the _fuck_ she was. _Now_. Answers first. She had always been good in a crisis.

She staggered to the mouth of the alley, still dizzy, and looked the street up and down. Her initial, wild assessment based on the alley hadn’t been far wrong: an ugly, drab, littered colonnade of indistinguishable urban destitution proceeded up and down both sides of a long, two-lane street with enough room on the sides for cars to park. It felt and looked gray, but maybe that was the weather: a perfectly smooth bowl of slate hung overhead. The chill cut right through Tess’s light sweater and skirt. There was no one outside, and the streetlights were on, though it was just light enough to see without them.

The loudest sound was that of her own shaky gasping, but Tess could hear noise in the distance: a single siren wailing, a general background hum. It felt real, or at least the chill seeping into her skin sure did, but then that begged the question: she hadn’t brought herself here, so how had she come to be...here, wherever Here was, and—

 _You know what_ , she thought to herself, gritting back a swirl of panic, _let’s worry about the why and how and what the fuck is going on after we find out where Here is. One step at a time, Tess. Move your feet_.

She picked a direction and started walking.

It felt like morning. Something about the glazen calm didn’t feel empty, just sleepy, and the first person she saw—a barefooted girl in a skirt so short her ass hung out, high heels dangling from her fingers, hair wild, who popped out unexpectedly from around a corner—reinforced that sense. The girl blinked at Tess, tired but equally surprised. They looked each other up and down, and then passed each other quickly without a word.

_So, wherever this is, it’s that end of town, huh? Okay, well, cool._

The buildings themselves were kind of like New York City in period flicks, but had an imitative, prematurely decayed look to them. There were no telephone poles; signs were instead pasted onto lamp posts. They were in English as often as they were in Chinese, though she saw many other languages as well. The English spellings were American. The two languages concurrent wasn’t strange to her in itself, since she had grown up around a huge immigrant population where that was normal, but the closest place that might offer a scenario like this was New York City, maybe Chicago as a distant second, but even New York was hours away. The rolling steel curtains made her think of Hong Kong or Tokyo, but New York also had those; the difference in her mind there was those in New York tended to be larger, not for small businesses. She saw shops, bars; a mangy, lean cat or seven. 

Tess eventually stumbled upon a sign saying Saltwater Station and stairs leading down. Meanwhile, the sky had gotten lighter. Her thought that it was morning seemed right.

“Well, shit,” she muttered, eying the staircase, and the light so far down at the end of the tunnel. If it was a subway station, there had to be a map down there, right? A map with a city name on it. _Maybe it even has a water fountain. God, I’m so thirsty_. But going down meant, potentially, a hole with no back exit.

She checked the street again; she didn’t see anybody. 

Tess descended, one hand on the railing to keep her balance. Her boots only had low heels, but they still made stairs a bit of a nosedive. _I should have changed out of my work clothes first. I have better shoes for this_. 

“Well, you know what? Next time I anticipate a massive hallucination I’ll be ready. I'll wear the fucking Birkenstocks or whatever. The clogs, not the sandals, they've got better arch support. Socks...and I'll be fucking wearing pants, next time. Comfy ones. Sweatpants. Hoodie. Giant goddamn...kigurumi and socks with sandals. Might not be as fucking aesthetic or what the fuck ever but at least I'll be _comfortable_.” 

She made it to the bottom and found herself at a ragged set of turnstiles with a map on the adjacent wall, and a tunnel stretching to the left and the right into the distance.

Tess walked over and stared in bewilderment at an alarmingly complex, multicolored knot with a legend in ten languages.

“Well, fuck me,” she mumbled—

Her heart almost stopped and she jumped as all her thoughts and senses rerouted. How long had she been staring at the map?

There was someone there that she had not noticed until they were practically on top of her, their steps clicking quietly in sequence as they descended the way she had come.

She turned her head slightly to look just as they came into view. They were alone; they were tall; they wore a dark suit with gold piping, striking, ominous; they were a black hole in the seedy gloom: long silver hair that fell in their, _his_ , face. And it struck Tess that he had a bird on his shoulder—did they let people do that here?

The figure stopped at the second to the last step, dead in his tracks, hands resting in his pockets. 

The hair rose on the back of Tess’s neck. This man was _aware_ of her and he had paused upon the fact. Oh, god...

Tess snapped her face back to the sign and she stood there, paralyzed. She didn’t even see the sign anymore though her eyes were wide open. _Please leave me alone. Please don’t hurt me_.

She almost flinched when she heard him move. He took the last two steps down to the landing, the soles of his shoes appallingly loud in the ambient silence. There was a faint echo. They squeaked on the floor as he turned, and…

And walked past her, behind her, slowly. Deliberately. 

She heard him stop again. Tess counted her breaths, even, deep. _Please just go away. I don’t have anything, please. Please, I don’t.._.

It felt like forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a handful of seconds. Half a minute at the absolute most. Tess didn’t dare move, afraid that any reaction on her part might provoke him. 

The bird shifted and made a soft noise of agitation, fluffing its wings. Tess flinched, and gasped.

He started walking again and Tess almost passed out in relief. Somehow she stayed on her feet, and when he was far enough away she slid sideways to the turnstile. She didn’t have a ticket, but she crawled over the top of one stall and hurried into a station that proved to be even more decrepit.

The platform had a clock and a train schedule inside. The time was barely six in the morning according to it, and the metro line advertised was not one Tess recognized. That in itself might not have been very concerning, but Tess did know geography pretty damn well, and again she saw the name that had made her snort when looking at the sign—she did not recognize any city by the name of Noctis Labirynthus, let alone its metropolitan subway system. 

_Noctis Labyrinthus; labyrinth of the night_ . Not that Tess spoke Latin, but that wasn't hard one to work out. There were some wild place names she knew of—she could think of two offhand that were better as terms for sexual congress than postage, which on that note might have made CSPAN a lot more interesting if wrinkles were your kink—but no place on Earth that she knew of was named Noctis Labyrinthus. It was a name so unusual she felt like that was one she would have heard on an internet list, if it existed. It would have been on the nose even for _Final Fantasy_. The place was surreal, like something out of a noir tinted fever dream. 

_Hell, it even has its very own dark_ —

She pushed the encounter out of her immediate frame of reference. Her head was full of raging debris and Tess needed to find out where she was. That was the most important thing right now; everything in her was focused on that goal. Anything not immediately relevant went on the backburner.

Still, she couldn’t quite shake the nagging sense that she had just missed something key. The low grade anxiety simmering beneath her outward calm swelled, zeroing in on that sense and stalling. She took a heavy breath and let it out firmly.

There was a box of newspapers next to a nearly empty vending machine full of drinks she didn’t recognize and a couple of benches, and she walked up to it. She looked for the title and the date, and when she saw both she nearly fell over.

“Oh, you have got to be _shitting_ me,” she hissed. Now she knew this was a joke. It couldn’t be anything but; the date read February 7, 2071, and the newspaper’s title was _The Arean Times_ —which didn’t actually register as a demonym at first, just... _really_ questionable, even malapropos, until she saw the Chinese edition right next to it, with the same general layout and photographs. Tess didn’t speak any Chinese, but she could field a little Japanese, and sometimes they used the same characters. She recognized 火星 人 . In that case; Arean in place of Martian? _It’s not Aryan, Arean is an actual word, fine, and maybe I guess someone figured_ Martian _was a little too little green mennish, but what the hell, man. Why couldn’t they just say Mars Times? What idiot made that call?_

Tess straightened up and looked around herself with an incredulous, helpless little grumble, finding herself completely at a loss to explain any of this. This platform was a plain tube of puke green tile, much of it chipping. It smelled like a stale sewer down here, and she was still deeply uncomfortable after her encounter. But, it smelled real, and she had walked a distance of at least three city blocks, probably more—of course this could be an incredibly elaborate setup, but who would bother? And why? How was it possible?

“For the record,” she announced to the empty air. “If this is some kind of Candid Camera bullshit, I did not sign any consent forms to be kidnapped and tormented. This isn’t funny, so believe me when I say I will happily feed you a shit salad in court and spend the rest of my life eating caviar and Cheval Blanc off the settlement." 

Only problem was, nothing answered her but the chime. A train was coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't speak Chinese but that's what Google Translate said, lol.
> 
> Okay, I guess I can't help myself. I like my idiot crackfics taken horribly seriously, and I've been on an isekai manwha bender lately--and in fanfic, although I love OC fics, I've grown tired of the trope where people show up and wait for shit to happen to them. This isn't quite a self-insert, although it gets close enough to be suspicious, and moreover it will involve a lot of what I do with some of my other fics:
> 
> That's right, POLITICS Y'ALL. This story is as much about the political scenario of Mars as it is about the characters, and some of this is going to be social issues, such as income inequality and issues of privilege, and crime and corruption in the political realm, 'white collar' crime included.


End file.
